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Lisamarie Bensman
Hilbert College What does your research focus on? My research focuses on sexual behavior, particularly orgasms. I examine the subjective aspects of these situations. How do individuals perceive their orgasm experiences and why? I am currently exploring the role of context in said perceptions. Orgasm experiences appear to be more satisfying when they occur in the partnered context (i.e., from sexual activity with another person) than in the solitary context (i.e., self-masturbation). Individuals report these partnered orgasms to be both physically and psychological more intense and enjoyable.
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Dani Bassett
University of California, Santa Barbara www.danisbassett.com What does your research focus on? My research focuses on the very basic issue of understanding how the interactions between a system’s components constrain and enable that system’s dynamics. The human brain is a very complex system for which this question is particularly fascinating and has pervasive ramifications for the human condition.
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Jamil Zaki
Stanford University ssnl.stanford.edu What does your research focus on? I study the cognitive and neural bases of social cognition and behavior, but that’s not very specific! For the past several years, my research focused on empathy and social cognition: how we make sense of and respond to other minds. In graduate school, I examined what’s known as “empathic accuracy” — one individual’s ability to insightfully assess another individual’s emotional states over time.
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Tessa West
New York University http://psych.nyu.edu/westlab What does your research focus on? My research primarily examines the dynamics that unfold during dyadic interactions, with a particular focus on the intergroup (e.g., cross-race) context. I study how individuals come to make sense of their partners’ behaviors, whether the inferences they make based on these behaviors are accurate, and how psychologists can shape such inferences to improve the quality of intergroup relationships. I also study basic person perception processes, and my theoretical work focuses on developing a unified approach to defining and studying accuracy in interpersonal perception.
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A. Janet Tomiyama
University of California, Los Angeles www.dishlab.org What does your research focus on? Eating is the thread that ties all of my research together. I study the way we eat (whether that’s overeating in response to things like stress, or not eating, meaning fasting and dieting) and how that makes us healthy or unhealthy. As a health psychologist, I tend to examine biological outcome variables like the stress hormone cortisol, or telomeres, a biomarker of aging represented by the length of the caps that protect chromosomes.
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Kate Sweeny
University of California, Riverside http://faculty.ucr.edu/~ksweeny What does your research focus on? I have two primary lines of research, both of which address the question of how people manage difficult life events. My first line of research examines the understudied experience of awaiting uncertain news. People frequently face difficult waiting periods when they anticipate news regarding their own or their loved ones’ health, professional prospects, and academic outcomes, and my research reveals how people cope with this type of uncertainty and seeks to identify successful strategies for navigating painful waiting periods.
